Why MYSTERIES? Because that is the genre I read. Why PARADISE? Because that is where I live.
Among other things, this blog, the result of a 2008 New Year's resolution, will act as a record of books that I've read, and random thoughts.

30 April 2015

When a skeleton is discovered hidden at the top of a gothic Victorian
building in Edinburgh, which is scheduled for renovation, Cold Case
Squad detective Karen Pirie is given the task of identifying the
decades-old bones. Her investigation leads her back to past conflicts,
false identities and buried secrets...

My Take
It is actually a while since I have read a Val McDermid novel, and where better to start than a stand alone? You'll notice that I have given this a "historical fiction" label, mainly because so much of this novel is bedded in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. This is certainly one of those novels that sends you out to brush up on your history.

Although in one sense this is not a Cold case, because there is no previous case on the books, the skeleton discovered on the building rooftop has certainly been there for some time, and the bullet hole in the skull puts it in the murder category. Karen Pirie's first task is to identify it, and the second to work out who the murderer is. Modern technology and some good old-fashioned investigation helps Karen and her offsider Jason "the Mint" give the skeleton a name, but why has no-one reported him missing?

For me the novel is a reminder of what a superb story teller Val McDermid is.

28 April 2015

Someone's getting married. Someone's getting murdered.In a dark, dark wood
Nora hasn't seen Clare for ten years. Not since Nora walked out of school one day and never went back. There was a dark, dark house
Until, out of the blue, an invitation to Clare’s hen do arrives. Is this a chance for Nora to finally put her past behind her?And in the dark, dark house there was a dark, dark room

But something goes wrong. Very wrong.

And in the dark, dark room....

Some things can’t stay secret for ever.

My Take

This is an excellent debut title. (note it is not being published until August 2015)

After
hearing nothing from her friend Clare for ten years, Nora gets an
invitation to Clare's hen do. She is not sure why Clare has invited her,
particularly since she doesn't appear to have been invited to the
wedding.

The
weekend is being spent at an isolated cottage in Northumbria and in the
long run there are only six of them, including a male whom Nora has
never met before. Nora realises this is not really going to be a fun weekend, particularly after she is told who Clare is marrying.48 hours after arriving for the weekend Nora wakes up in a hospital bed, alive, but knowing that someone is dead. She tries to piece together what happened, and why the police appear to have a guard outside her door.

My rating: 4.8 About the author

Ruth Ware grew up in Lewes, in East Sussex. After graduating from
Manchester University she moved to Paris, before settling in north
London. She has worked as a waitress, a bookseller, a teacher of English
as a foreign language and a press officer. Married, with two small
children, In a Dark, Dark Wood is her debut thriller.

At first, the murder scene
appears sad, but not unusual: a young woman undone by drugs and
prostitution, her six-year-old daughter dead alongside her. But then
detectives find a strange piece of evidence in the squalid house: the
platinum credit card of a very wealthy - and long dead - steel tycoon.
What is a heroin-addicted hooker doing with the credit card of a
well-known and powerful man who died months ago? This is the question
that the most junior member of the investigative team, Detective
Constable Fiona Griffiths, is assigned to answer.

But D.C.
Griffiths is no ordinary cop. She's earned a reputation at police
headquarters in Cardiff, Wales, for being odd, for not picking up on
social cues, for being a little overintense. And there's that gap in her
past, the two-year hiatus that everyone assumes was a breakdown. But
Fiona is a crack investigator, quick and intuitive. She is immediately
drawn to the crime scene, and to the tragic face of the six-year-old
girl, who she is certain has something to tell her . . . something that
will break the case wide open.

Ignoring orders and protocol,
Fiona begins to explore far beyond the rich man's credit card and into
the secrets of her seaside city. And when she uncovers another dead
prostitute, Fiona knows that she's only begun to scratch the surface of a
dark world of crime and murder. But the deeper she digs, the more
danger she risks - not just from criminals and killers but from her own
past . . . and the abyss that threatens to pull her back at any time.

My Take

We know from the very beginning that there is something rather odd about Fiona Griffiths. More than anything she wants to be accepted in "Planet Normal". Part of our job as a reader is to unravel why that is not happening. Fiona gets a better understanding of herself when she is told by a friend that she has post traumatic stress disorder, but she can't work out what has triggered this.

We know that Fiona lost about two years of her life at the end of her schooling. Eventually we learn that Fiona was diagnosed at that time with a particular disorder. Is it Asberger's or something else?

But all this is not to say that Fiona Griffiths is not a valuable detective: as those who are in charge of her know, she needs careful management, but she has insights that no-one else seems capable of. And she tends not to do things by the book, to think outside the square, to act without thinking too much about the danger to herself.

This book is the story of Fiona's first murder case: she is drawn in by the murders of Janet, a part-time prostitute, and her six year old daughter April. She is convinced that Janet and April were in hiding at the time they died, but what were they hiding from? Is the credit card of a dead millionaire that Janet has in her possession a vital clue?

Who slipped cyanide into the ceremonial wine of ecstasy at the House of
the Sacred Flame? The other initiates and the High Priest claim to be
above earthly passions. But Roderick Alleyn discovers that the victim
had provoked lust and jealousy, and he suspects that more evil still
lurks behind the Sign of the Sacred Flame…

My Take

This was #4 in Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn series (although Marsh's first novel was published only in 1934, two years earlier).
It features the team of Detective Inspector Alleyn, his offsider Fox, and journalist Nigel Bathgate. It all begins when Bathgate enters the House of the Sacred Flame, a new religious sect not far from his flat, in search of amusement, and witnesses the death of a woman from poisoning. She has been participating in a ceremony where a chalice of wine is handed around a small circle of people and is finally drunk by her. Bathgate catches the unmistakeable smell of bitter almonds.

Cara Quayne was an extremely wealthy woman who was known to have left most of her fortune to the House of the Sacred Flame and to it's priest. This was her first occasion as the Sacrificial Vessel. She had been training for a month for the event.

To make sure the reader is up to speed, Alleyn and Bathgate draw up a list of suspects with motives at least twice. The author drops a couple of large hints about the identity of the murderer, which I should have picked up but didn't. There's a matter of missing bearer bonds, addiction and drug running, and entrapment, but in the long run Alleyn would not have solved the case without help from a couple of suspects.

It is an interesting novel because there is mention of how other authors like Agatha Christie would have fleshed out a plot like this.

20 April 2015

My poor Kindle 2, bought in 2009, gave notice of its imminent death last week.
It refused to come to life when I pushed the "wake me up" switch.
I could fool it into life by connecting it to the computer as if it was getting a life saving drink, and then it would activate when I pulled the umbilical cord out. However if I then left it unattended, it went back to sleep, and would not activate.

So I thought, can I do without it? I do read using the Kindle App on my iPad, but I do read nearly a quarter of my books as e-books. I find the iPad a bit cumbersome when lying on my side reading in bed, so I bit the bullet.

I now have a Paper White Kindle - because of the Australian $ exchange rate, it was a bit more expensive than I would have liked, but in contrast to my older Kindle 2, it is back lit (so I could, if I wanted to, read in the dark), and there are no buttons - I can just touch the side of the screen to get to the next page.

I'm still learning the rest of its features, but I am amused at the way it can tell me how much time a book will take me to read.

One thing I would like to know is whether I can copy the content of my Kindle2 into my Paper White. Any experiences?

Rebecca
Wilding, an archaeology professor, traces the past for a living.

But suddenly, truth and certainty are turning against her. Rebecca is accused of
serious fraud, and worse, she suspects – she knows – that her
husband, Stephen, is having an affair.

Desperate to find answers, Rebecca leaves with Stephen for Greece, Italy and
Paris, where she can uncover the conspiracy against her, and hopefully win
Stephen back to her side, where he belongs. There’s too much at stake – her
love, her work, her family.

But on the idyllic Amalfi Coast, Stephen goes swimming and doesn’t come back.

In a swirling daze of panic and fear, Rebecca is dealt with fresh allegations.
And with time against her, she must uncover the dark secrets that stand between
her and Stephen, and the deceit that has chased her halfway around the world.

My Take:

Rebecca Wilding is having a tough time at Coast University, particularly with the Dean of the Arts faculty, Professor Priscilla Chiton, who seems determined to make her life hell. Priscilla used to be a friend, but now Rebecca suspects she is having an affair with her husband Stephen, Professor of Economics. Rebecca also suspects that Stephen may be dabbling on the stock market again.

Suddenly things start to go very wrong when accounting irregularities crop up and Rebecca is accused of siphoning university funds into her own accounts.

There were some heart stopping moments in this thriller, particularly when they are driving a red sports car up a narrow road on the Amalfi Coast.

Stephen's disappearance leads to Rebecca becoming a chief suspect for his possible murder, and she goes on the run from the police, attempting to track him down in Paris, where she thinks he is meeting up with Priscilla.

Ann
Turner is an award-winning screenwriter and director, avid reader, and
history lover. She is drawn to salt-sprayed coasts, luminous landscapes,
and the people who inhabit them all over the world. She is a passionate
gardener. Her films include the historical feature Celia starring
Rebecca Smart—which Time Out listed as one of the fifty greatest
directorial debuts of all time, Hammers Over The Anvil starring Russell
Crowe and Charlotte Rampling, and the psychological thriller
Irresistible starring Susan Sarandon, Sam Neill, and Emily Blunt. Ann
has lectured in film at the Victorian College of the Arts. Returning to
her first love, the written word, in her debut novel The Lost Swimmer
Ann explores themes of love, trust and the dark side of relationships.
She is currently working on her second novel, Out of the Ice, a mystery
thriller set in Antarctica. Ann was born in Adelaide and lives in
Victoria.

17 April 2015

Kelly Roberts finds refuge in the rugged and remote cattle country of
northern Australia, but when tragedy strikes she is forced to find a
new life for herself and her children outside of Rainsford Station.

She
retreats to the family's only asset – a freehold block of land owned
jointly by her eccentric father-in-law, Quinn. In the valley at
Evergreen Springs, Quinn hopes the fractured family might all come
together to start over again.

Life in Queensland's far north is
wildly unpredictable, with daily challenges and the wet season, in all
its wild majesty, to survive. But when twelve-year-old Rob makes the
gruesome discovery of a dead body in the valley, real peril comes far
too close to home.

Tracking North is a beautiful family story about life in the stunning Gulf Country, one of the world's most unique and fascinating places.

My Take

First of all, this is a book on the very edge of crime fiction, on the soft edge one might say. Certainly there is a crime, and a murder, and some violence, but essentially it is a story abut a way of life in Australia, in the Far North, and a family making its way in a world that is changing rapidly.

Kerry McGinnis has obviously drawn on first hand experience of living and working in remote Queensland, and I couldn't help wondering how a non-Australian reader would see the landscape and life style that she describes. Perhaps it will be an eye opener.

I did enjoy the book, inveterate crime fiction reader that I am, much more than I expected to, even the romance that won its way in the end. And, as the friend who recommended it to me said, there is mystery, there is the odd puzzle to be solved.

My rating: 4.3

About the author

Kerry McGinnis was born in Adelaide and at the age of twelve took up a
life of droving with her father and four siblings. The family travelled
extensively across the Northern Territory and Queensland before settling
on a station in the Gulf Country. Kerry has worked as a shepherd,
droving hand, gardener and stock-camp and station cook on the family
property Bowthorn, north-west of Mt Isa. She is the author of two
volumes of memoir, Pieces of Blue and Heart Country, and the bestselling novels The Waddi Tree,Wildhorse Creek and Mallee Sky. Kerry now lives in Bundaberg.

14 April 2015

A powerful historical novel by the late Ariana Franklin and her daughter Samantha Norman, The Siege Winter
is a tour de force mystery and murder, adventure and intrigue, a battle
for a crown, told by two courageous young women whose fates are
intertwined in twelfth century England's devastating civil war.

1141.
England is engulfed in war as King Stephen and his cousin, the Empress
Matilda, vie for the crown. In this dangerous world, not even Emma, an
eleven-year-old peasant, is safe. A depraved monk obsessed with redheads
kidnaps the ginger-haired girl from her village and leaves her for
dead. When an archer for hire named Gwyl finds her, she has no memory of
her previous life. Unable to abandon her, Gwyl takes the girl with him,
dressing her as a boy, giving her a new name - Penda - and teaching her
to use a bow. But Gwyn knows that the man who hurt Penda roams free,
and that a scrap of evidence she possesses could be very valuable.

Gwyl
and Penda make their way to Kenilworth [Kenniford], a small but strategically
important fortress that belongs to fifteen-year-old Maud. Newly wedded
to a boorish and much older husband after her father's death, the fierce
and determined young chatelaine tempts fate and Stephen's murderous
wrath when she gives shelter to the empress.

Aided by a garrison
of mercenaries, including Gwyl and his odd red-headed apprentice, Maud
will stave off Stephen's siege for a long, brutal winter that will bring
a host of visitors to Kenilworth [Kenniford] - kings, soldiers . . . and a sinister
monk with deadly business to finish.My Take

After the synopsis above, there is not a lot left to tell you about the plot of this novel. To my mind it is much more a historical novel than a crime fiction one, although certainly it does have mysteries. It is set in a fascinating period of English history when the country is torn apart by civil war, King Stephen vs his cousin the Empress Matilda. And the portrayal of this period has a real feeling of authenticity to it. It was a brutal time when nobility seem to have swapped sides readily, once they could see which way the wind was blowing.

The structure of the novel is interesting: at Perton Abbey the abbot is dying.He has something important to do. he has to record a tale of treachery and murder, also a story of courage and love, before he too twirls off life's tree; yet he is too ill, too weak to write it himself.

And so he is assigned a young scribe to write it for him.

Samantha Norman completed this novel in tribute to her mother Ariana Franklin who unfortunately died in 2011.

When Olivia Brookes calls the police to report that her husband and
children are missing, she believes she will never see them again. She
has reason to fear the worst; this isn’t the first tragedy that Olivia
has experienced. Now, two years later, Detective Chief Inspector Tom
Douglas is called in to investigate this family again, but this time
it’s Olivia who has disappeared. All the evidence suggests that she was
here, in the family home, that morning.

But her car is in the garage, and her purse is in her handbag – on
the kitchen table. The police want to issue an appeal, but for some
reason every single picture of this family has been removed from albums,
from phones, from computers.

And then they find the blood…

Has the past caught up with Olivia?

Sleep Tight – if you can. You never know who’s watching.

My take

Rachel Abbott is one of my finds for this year - I have read all 3 in the DI Tom Douglas series. I thought that perhaps this one was marginally not quite as good as the earlier two, but it is still a page turner, and there is a little twist right at the end. There are little puzzles for the police to solve all the way through, and that keeps you reading.

Olivia Brookes' husband Robert needs to control every part of her life. He has been there whenever she needs him - when her lover disappears, when she needs to sell her house, when her parents die, when she becomes depressed, and when he best friend appears to desert her. But it takes Olivia a long time to begin to connect the dots. And then she realises the knife edge she and her children are living on.

My reason for saying this title is not quite as good as the earlier ones lies in the way bits of the plot strain the bounds of credibility. The structure is interesting: mainly a tale told from two points of view: Olivia's and Tom Douglas's, but occasionally we segway into Robert Brookes' mind as well.

10 April 2015

Two babies are born.Two brothers. United and indivisible, sharing everything. Twins in all but blood.

As
Germany marches into its Nazi Armageddon, the ties of family,
friendship and love are tested to the very limits of endurance. And the
brothers are faced with an unimaginable choice....Which one of them will
survive?

Ben Elton's most personal novel to date,Two Brothers transports the reader to the time of history's darkest hour.

TWO BROTHERS is on the edge of crime fiction, but there is plenty of mystery. In 1956 Russian born British citizen John Stone, living and working in London in the Foreign Office as a translator, receives a letter from East Germany from his sister in law, whom he has thought of as dead for the past decade. MI5 is also interested in why he has received this letter. Do the Stasi in East Germany want to set him up as a spy, and who is the woman who has contacted him?

The setting gives Elton the opportunity to explore the past, to go back to the rise of Hitler, and the establishment of anti-Semitism as German government policy. So in a sense this is a historical novel, which gives a glimpse of what it was like to be a Jew in Berlin from the 1930s onwards.

Elton based this novel on the stories of his two uncles who fought on opposing sides in World War II.

As I've remarked before, reading British crime fiction is not actually much of a challenge for me, because my local library has so much on offer, and I am hooked on so many authors.

British Books Challenge 2015 - mine will be crime fiction

Of the 44 books I've read this year, I have classified 17 as British.
Usually the classification relates to the author, although I do find it hard to put Peter Robinson's Banks series anywhere else, even though he is Canadian.

So my participation in the 2015 British Books challenge, being hosted by Fluttering Butterflies, is more record keeping than anything else, because I've already completed the initial challenge of reading 12 titles.

9 April 2015

* All books
must be from the mystery category (crime fiction, detective fiction, espionage,
etc.). The mystery/crime must be the primary feature of the
book--ghost stories, paranormal, romance, humor, etc are all welcome as
ingredients, but must not be the primary category under which these
books would be labeled at the library or bookstore.

*Challengers
may play either the Silver Age or Golden Age Card—or both.

*BINGOS may
be claimed by completing all spaces in a row--horizontally, vertically, or
diagonally. You may also claim a “Four
Corner” BINGO by reading a book for each of the four corners plus two more
spaces—any two. A valid BINGO must have six
complete spaces.

8 April 2015

Ever thought you would like to read your way across America?
The USA Fiction Challenge asks you to do just that. Read just one novel from each state - you choose whether the link is the setting or the author. You choose whether you confine yourself to a particular genre or not.

This was a challenge that I initiated last year and it is ongoing, you can do for as long as you like.

For years, the serial kidnapper known as the Piper got rich by abducting children from San Francisco’s wealthiest families.

When
crime reporter Scott Fleetwood gets a call from a man identifying
himself as the Piper and offers an exclusive interview, Fleetwood jumps
at the chance. But the caller turns out to be a fake, and the rash
decision costs the life of the real Piper’s latest victim.

For
eight long years, Fleetwood has lived with unbearable guilt—and the
enduring disdain of the entire Bay area. Now he hears from the real
Piper—and it’s not for an interview. The kidnapper has the reporter’s
son. But he doesn’t want money…he wants blood. And he’s going to use
Fleetwood to get it.

In the tradition of Harlan Coben and Gregg Hurwitz, Simon Wood weaves a plot thick with suspense and heavy with action. Paying the Piper grabs hold from page one and doesn’t let go until new debts are paid and old scores settled.

My take

This is a gripping read, lots of hold-your-breath moments.

Scott Fleetwood has lived with the guilt of the Piper's last abduction eight years before. He had thought like a journalist rather than a human being and hesitation cost a child's life. The note on the victim's chest - "You are to blame" - said it all, but now, eight years on, the Piper brings it all much closer to home when he takes one of Scott's twin sons.

This story really is a roller coaster ride and there are some elements further down the track that will really take you by surprise.

4 April 2015

If you look in the right hand margin you will see that I am running a poll.

I am trying to determine what proportion of readers make plans about what they will read.
I know many bloggers are like me: they join Reading Challenges (or set their own), create lists of books to look out for, or similar.

But maybe you don't: you are one of those people who just go to the library or bookshop to select your next book.

3 April 2015

I've made a bit of reading progress since my last Books On the Go and I've linked those I've read to my reviews.
Of course I included in my reading for February and March quite a number of "spur of the moment" reads with the result that some books appear on my new list (see below). I actually read 11 out of the 21 that I had listed. My new list has 25 titles on it.

2 April 2015

I'm very pleased with the amount of reading I'm getting done, and also with the quality of most of the books.
The titles have been a mixture of recently published, review copies, and vintage crime fiction.

I even managed a non-fiction title this time too, although it was so closely linked to Agatha Christie that was not surprising.

My pick of the month was THE HUNTING DOGS by Jorn Lier Horst, translated from Norwegian, the
eighth title published in the William Wisting series, the third to be published in English.
Winner of The Glass Key (top Nordic novel 2013) and winner of The Golden
Revolver (top Norwegian crime novel 2012).

In this crime novel by CWA Diamond Dagger winner Catherine Aird,
Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan returns to solve a locked-room mystery,
but he's thrown for a loop when a prominent industrialist turns up dead

On the hottest day in living memory, Richard Mallory Tindall, the owner
of a patent firm, does not return home to Cleete village. When a man is
found crushed to death, Tindall's case goes from missing person to homicide.

In the course of solving murder cases, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan
has seen all manner of ugly death. But there's something particularly
gruesome about this one, the body crushed beneath the marble and iron of
an old Saxon church tower. With rubble blocking off access to the crime
scene, no one can get close enough to inspect the body. What little
evidence is available - a burned match, a black thread, an earring -
doesn't bode well for a quick and easy solution.

Even the
legendarily cool-headed great detective might begin to crack when a
second body turns up. And then an important file goes missing from
Sloan's office. How does it all connect?

My Take

This is a delightful cozy. There are bodies of course but even their demise is scientifically achieved. In fact the whole plot of the novel is rather intricately based around patents, science, and secrets.

There's humour too and some interesting characters, ambition, and deception. Through all the author lays out the clues for the reader to sift through and to decide who the culprit is.

See more about Catherine Aird at the publisher site.
"Grounded as she was in the traditional mystery, it’s not surprising that
her books reflect many of the aspects of mysteries from the Golden Age
of detection (roughly 1913 to 1953) when fair play was the name of the
game and the reader an active participant in uncovering whodunit."

1 April 2015

Many crime fiction bloggers write a summary post at the end of each
month listing what they've read, and some, like me, even go as far as
naming their pick of the month.

This meme is an attempt to aggregate those summary posts.
It is an invitation to you to write your own summary post for March 2015, identify your crime fiction best read of the month, and add your post's URL to the Mr Linky below.
If Mr Linky does not appear for you, leave the URL in a comment and I will add it myself.

You
can list all the books you've read in the past month on your post,
even if some of them are not crime fiction, but I'd like you to
nominate your crime fiction pick of the month.